Posts Tagged ‘$257 million’

When I was a kid we had two dogs – a cagey wire-hair dachshund, and a typically elitist poodle.

Every single feeding was exactly the same. The dachshund would gobble down her food while the poodle stared at her bowl in haughty disdain.

Then, at some point right about the time when the dachshund had finished eating all the food in her bowl, the poodle would decide that surely the dachshund’s food must be better, and that she’d rather eat it.

So she would go over to the dachshund’s bowl, only alas, there was nothing in it.

Meanwhile, the dachshund would circle over to the poodle’s bowl, and glomb down that food, too.

We had to feed the dogs separately, or that poodle would have literally starved to death. Because as smart as that dog could be in some ways, she was dumb as a box of rocks when it came to common sense. And she just never learned.

Read the following and tell me if you don’t see a similarity between that poodle and the Democrat Party:

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state’s top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He’d better hope this works out better than it has for Maryland.

We reported in May that after passing a millionaire surtax nearly one-third of Maryland’s millionaires had gone missing, thus contributing to a decline in state revenues. The politicians in Annapolis had said they’d collect $106 million by raising its income tax rate on millionaire households to 6.25% from 4.75%. In cities like Baltimore and Bethesda, which apply add-on income taxes, the top tax rate with the surcharge now reaches as high as 9.3%—fifth highest in the nation. Liberals said this was based on incomplete data and that rich Marylanders hadn’t fled the state.

Well, the state comptroller’s office now has the final tax return data for 2008, the first year that the higher tax rates applied. The number of millionaire tax returns fell sharply to 5,529 from 7,898 in 2007, a 30% tumble. The taxes paid by rich filers fell by 22%, and instead of their payments increasing by $106 million, they fell by some $257 million. […]

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysis of federal tax return data on people who migrated from one state to another found that Maryland lost $1 billion of its net tax base in 2008 by residents moving to other states. That’s income that’s now being taxed and is financing services in Virginia, South Carolina and elsewhere. […]

Thanks in part to its soak-the-rich theology, Maryland still has a $2 billion deficit and Montgomery County is $760 million in the red. Governor Martin O’Malley’s office tells us he wants the higher rates to expire “as scheduled at the end of 2010.” But there are bills in both chambers of the legislature to extend the surcharge. The state’s best hope is that politicians in other states are as self-destructive as those in Annapolis.

I swear, you’d be better off putting my poodle in charge of food collection than you would be putting Democrats in charge of anything.

Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10% luxury tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000 and private planes above $250,000. Democrats like Ted Kennedy and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his “no new taxes” pledge.

But it wasn’t long before even these die-hard class warriors noticed they’d badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Messrs. Mitchell and Kennedy’s home states of Maine and Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77% drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too. January 1 was disappearance day.

Over and over again, Democrats keep making the same mistake. They are continually amazed that they keep getting the same results. And then they fiercely insist that those results won’t apply the next time.

The Maryland “tax the rich” example has been demonstrated again and again.

Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — New York State’s income tax revenue has dropped 36 percent from the same period in 2008, Governor David Paterson said, “frustrating” his attempt to close a projected $2.1 billion budget deficit.

“We added personal income tax, which we thought would make the falloff 10 percent to 15 percent,” Paterson, a Democrat, said on CNBC today, referring to $5.2 billion in new or increased taxes. “This is what is so frustrating. It’s still 36 percent, meaning our revenues fell more in 2009 than they did in 2008.”

Charging that it’s “easy to rile against the rich,” Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday that theincome-tax increases being considered for the wealthiest New Yorkers would drive them from the city.

“One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50 percent of the taxes. In the city, that’s something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral,” the billionaire mayor said on his weekly radio show.

“The question is what’s fair. If 1 percent are paying 50 percent of the taxes, you want to make it even more? Anybody below that 1 percent, no taxes?”

Legislators in Albany are considering state income-tax hikes for households earning from $250,000 to $1 million to close a budget gap next year of at least $13 billion.

Don’t look now, but there’s a new War Between the States under way, and the south is winning. The most dramatic winner is Texas. The cover story of a recent (July 9) issue of The Economist compared California with Texas and implied that the Golden State is falling apart, while the Lone Star State is leading the nation out of the recession. Then, in a mid-July issue of National Review, Kevin D. Williamson said the nation is “Going Alamo,” with new jobs and businesses tipping southward, draining California, the Midwest, and Northeast of their former economic glory.

One indicator of the trend, according to Williamson, is the cost of renting a U-Haul truck for a one-way move. From Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California, the cost is $900, while a one-way rental from San Francisco to Austin is $3,000, due to the exodus of trucks from California.

All this makes sense. We are a mobile nation. People can move easily enough (especially if they rent), and capital can move even faster. Capital, jobs, and businesses will go where they are most welcome, while capital leaves places where it is punished by higher taxes and over-regulation.

And lo and behold, Texas, with its low taxes, has created 70% of all US jobs since 2008. But liberals don’t want job creation, for all their bogus rhetoric; they want Marxism. They want class warfare. They want redistributionism. They want to “spread the wealth around.” No matter how ruinous it is. And no matter how badly it hurts the little people, who keep falling for class warfare demagoguery the way Charlie Brown keeps falling for Lucy’s promise to hold the football for him.

In spite of being warned that liberal class-warfare tax-the-rich-to-extinction policies would lead to Dodo-bird results, New York attacked the rich with a 31% income tax hike. And all they have to show for their eat-the-rich tax policies is record revenue shortfalls.

And how do Democrats react? Do they acknowledge proven, factual, repeatedly-documented reality? They don’t have it in them, anymore than my idiot poodle had it in her. Rather, they insist on performing the same failed experiment again in Illinois. And all that’s going to happen is that the rich will move or shelter their money, such that an even bigger tax burden ends up falling on the working class whom Democrats fallaciously claim to be helping.

And as foolish, as idiotic, as suicidal as putting Democrats in charge of a state is, the only thing worse is to put them in charge of the federal government.

Democrats were so determined to impose tax hikes on the rich that they are willing to ensure that NOBODY gets any tax cuts. The bi-partisan compromise vote was all on the Republicans’ side. And Democrats were afraid to allow a straight up-or-down vote on allowing tax cuts for all Americans. They preferred huge tax hikes for Americans, instead.

You can paint string yellow and sell it to these people as gold. And then you can do it again, and again, and again.